Olympic Marathoner Eliud Kipchoge’s first non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has sold at 17.9837 Etherum currency, equivalent to Sh4.02 million ($37,351.07) in a blockchain auction.

The sale which was backed by Momentble and Open Sea auction sites released Kipchoge’s digital cards that featured highlights in his career, the National Broadcaster KBC reported.

Kipchoge’s first NFTs ran for five days with the first set selling at an equivalent of Sh3.32 million. The initial set included multimedia content of the momentous 2019 INEOS challenge when Kipchoge finished a marathon under two hours.

The buyer of the NFT was a blockchain investor and will receive the artwork in form of a personalised video message from Eliud Kipchoge.

What are NFTs? (Courtesy of BBC News)

According to BBC News, an NFT which stands for non-fungible token is an asset with units that can be readily interchanged – like money.

Money for instance, you can get two Sh500 notes from a single Sh1000 note and the value will be the same.

A non-fungible asset, however, cannot be split like money. Most items auctioned as NFTs are usually highly priced artworks like the Mona Lisa.

In this case, the buyer of Kipchoge’s NFT will receive a video message by the Olympic marathoner. The buyer could choose to sell it later at a higher price.

Ethereum like many other digital currencies trade in blockchain and its is among the few that supports NFTs.

An NFT can, therefore, be anything like music, a painting that has been downloaded and converted into digital art and uploaded into a blockchain.

Trading NFTs on blockchain helps to eradicate piracy on antique and high-value artworks because only the current owner can possess an ownership certificate.

In the world of cryptos, a record of who owns what is stored on a shared ledger known as the blockchain. Records stored in blockchains cannot be forged since ledgers are maintained by so many computers across the world.

Currently the most expensive NFT was sold by digital artist Beeple for $69m (Sh7.38 billion).